Here is another instance of a recurring horror in American life, a senseless, lawless tragedy that repeats itself almost daily: “N.J. woman was holding a water bottle, not a knife, when cops killed her, family says.”
Police responded to seventh floor of The Pinnacle apartments on Main Street in Fort Lee at about 1:25 a.m. on July 28 after a 911 caller reported a family member was having a mental health crisis, the Attorney General’s office previously said in a statement.
The 911 caller was Chris, Lee’s brother, who made the call because their mother was concerned about Lee’s condition, according to the family.
After speaking to Chris in the hallway, officers attempted to enter the apartment, officials said.
Lee told the officer not to come in and shut the door, the Attorney General’s Office said. Officers forced the door open.
Officer Tony Pickens Jr. of the Fort Lee Police Department fired a single shot, which struck Lee in the chest, authorities said.
This happens all the time. A family member is having a mental health crisis and the family calls 911 for help. Instead of help, 911 dispatches young men with guns. The young men with guns shoot the family member.
Again, if you call 911 and say, “My nephew is having a mental health crisis and I am tired of dealing with him, so please send the police to our home to shoot him dead” you will be viewed as a monster and will likely be charged with a crime yourself.
But if, like hundreds of families every year, you call 911 and say “My nephew is having a mental health crisis and we need help, but please, please, I beg you, do not send armed men here to shoot him to death” then that is exactly what the police will do. It is what they have done. Over and over and over again.
This is what inevitably happens when police officers are perpetually armed with lethal force. So this is part of why I think it’s bonkers to have them carry guns all the time.
(See earlier: “The gun undermines the badge” and “Sir Robert Peel never came to America.”)
But it’s also why I like the idea of alternative crisis response units — having 911 send people who know what they’re doing to respond to someone in a mental health crisis instead of making police officers do this.
This is not some wild, outside-the-box notion. We have fire departments and fire companies. We have paramedics and ambulance corps. We have a Coast Guard and forest rangers. We already know and fully understand that many emergencies for which people need to call for help and assistance involve situations where Men With Guns is not what is needed.
Alas, in many areas, emergency dispatchers still also send the police even when somebody calls 911 to say that a building is on fire or that someone is having a heart attack. It’s not obvious to me why the response to that call about a heart attack should be “Paramedics are on their way, and we’re also sending some men with guns.”
If a 911 dispatcher sent firefighters or paramedics or even a forest-service search and rescue team to assist a family with a member having a mental health crisis those responders would likely be just as helpless and unhelpful as the police showing up, but at least they’d all be less likely to kill the person instead of helping them.
The Lee family did not need the police. And the police do not need to be sent to situations where they are not needed — where they are not trained or equipped to be of any help or any use.
To their credit, many police departments and FOPs have come to understand this. They’ve gotten past the defensive reflex to view every other form of “first responder” as competitors who are somehow stealing their share of some zero-sum pie. They want to do their job, not to be asked to do every job. And responding to people in mental health crisis is not their job — not what they signed on to do, or were prepared to do, or have the tools to do.
More than 100 cities now have non-police crisis response teams that can be dispatched to the kind of emergencies like the one the Lee family was experiencing. The Marshall Project has been reporting on and studying these police alternatives and summarizes the state of the effort here: “Sending Unarmed Responders Instead of Police: What We’ve Learned.”
The overall tone there is positive, but with a big theme of “experts say more research on their impact is needed” — meaning there’s a lot we still can’t be sure about how effective these programs have been.
But consider this:
There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job so far, according to experts. And data suggests unarmed responders rarely need to call in police. In Eugene, Oregon, which has operated the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (known locally as CAHOOTS) response team since 1989, roughly 1% of their calls end up requiring police backup, according to the organization. Albuquerque responders have asked for police in 1% of calls, as of January. In Denver, the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) had never called for police backup due to a safety issue as of July 2022, the most recent data available. In Durham, members of the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART) reported feeling safe on 99% of calls.
That’s remarkable.
But even more remarkable than the fact that “there have been no known major injuries of any community responder” is that there have been no know major injuries inflicted by any community responder.
They haven’t killed any of the people they were sent to help. That, alone, is enough to show that this approach is vastly better than sending the police.
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